At the end if the board doesn’t agree on a consensus, probably it is already a failure state. If you want an umpair number of board member, I would propose that the advantage would be done to the community.

I would create a committee for 1 year. No elections, just discussions, raised hands and meritocracy. Just to start and see how it goes. Evertything more is overkill for me.

Generally the chairman gives his vote just in very complex situations. And I wouldn’t vote at all

davidep:

Nethesis has now the control of this project and its resources. We cannot ignore this fact.

If we decide to have a board, how do we implement communitcation between board, teams and community? Do we ask to give detail reports? Do we just ask to post developments on forum? What procedures and security measurements do we create if decisions need to be taken fast? Or decisions that are taken when a large minority or even majority is against it?

We can use open discussions here in the community and sometimes a realtime chat/conference reporting all the decisions taken.

m.traeumner:

These are only my thoughts and of course the worst case.

It’s the worst case and paradoxically (at the contrary) in Nethesis my colleagues are sure that I will vote for the community

I want to highlight that being part of such “commitee” asks time and efforts. Are you sure that we will find people/time and consistent effort for a year?
Writing down some rules is easy, stick with them it’s hard.

It seems a good compromise with my proposal, however I don’t think we should implement a such rigid structure.

I’d start with a group of passionate people (non necessarily experts) like our ambassadors are, who want to engage in discussions with the whole community to steer the whole project.

As a Nethesis associate, I’m pursuing the idea of “Open Organization” where company decision are taken in the open. I’d like to see my colleagues here to discuss their ideas directly instead of delegating them to Alessio or Giacomo.

It is important to formalize a group that traces the current power partition among my company and the rest of the community that is accountable for decisions here. I hope this community will grow in the future and people steps in to take more and more accountable roles.

I hope the time commitment is minimal. The Fedora FESCO runs weekly meetings of 15 minutes each. We could do less because now we discuss things to grow a general consensus. When we see two or more valuable options arise, we bring them for a formal vote. That should not happen frequently…

The point is: the “central board” has the right to vote. Its member are delegated (thus should be elected). Its decisions are normative. Its discussions, decisions, vote are public because members must be accountable.

The idea of the fifty-fifty constraint is temporary. It’s a matter of reciprocal trust. I’d like it will be removed once the community is strong enough.

This is interesting stuff.
Being a re-converted apostate myself, I take some time to think about all being said here.
Not at least because it takes a while to grasp "The tyranny of structurelessness"
Something worth discussing with my collages too!

Thanks @mark_nl for pointing to this thread again. It has been a bit quiet for a while, but I think this topic deserves some extra push and attention. Can we put it on the agenda for Fosdem to talk about?

CEO is head. He represents company legally. Thats it NO power as of IT department.
IT Head -> governs IT dep (has ALL the power)

We are team of ::

NO devs with owner rights of repo (repo is owned by ME) and Im the only dev with push access to master
2 devs with repo write-access to their own branches
4 devs with read access to repo
All devs have write access to our bugtracker, but only I can approve bugh solutions (solution is not visible even to submitter until I approve solution),
All devs have read access to CNAME (Im the owner)

All the above minimalize the risk of abuse (like one want to take over, say, repo)
We deal with abusers instantly by throwing them out of our team with permanent ban on every piece of our infrastructure.

Thats it.

Advantages?

If CEO wants to overpower us, we simply cut him/her off company’s money and become independent,

Extremely easy decission-making => real vote (50+1 to agree)

Those dickheads at company administration level (CEO && “friends”) can fuck off as we are not structured as typical company => its in fact one-person (CEO-only) company

Glad that that structure works for your company; however I don’t think that structure will work here and having worked in South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and the UK - (I know 'm at risk of starting a flame-war and I don’t want to start one) I have to agree with Rob as I have yet to see that structure work and it is most definitely not how many normal people think.

I joined an IT Team of a large multinational company who subtly tried to impose that structure to the local office and I can definitely promise you that it was such a toxic environment to work in, it made Chernobyl look like a baby’s tea party.

Personally I would not support any company or organisation who setup and operated with a structure like that.

Hi to all,@developer11 gives us an example how it works at their company. Thanks for that.
I think too, like @robb it isn’t the right way for us.
But I think we should not make a political discussion of that.